The Desert Rose Read Online Free PDF

Pepper, who had been driving her boyfriends’ cars since she had begun dating at about age eleven. She just had absolute confidence behind the wheel, it was another facet Harmony envied, she herself got nervous driving sometimes but not Pepper, she would instantly honk at people if they made what she considered a driving error.
    As for her own problems about parallel parking it had resulted from hearing a horrible story on the radio many years before about a little baby who had gotten squashed by a woman who was parallel parking. The mother had just stepped into a store to buy something leaving her little boy to watch the baby which was in a stroller and the little boy got distracted and let the stroller roll off the curb and a woman who was parallel parking ran over it.
    For years the story kept coming back into her mind and upsetting her, the thought of a helpless little baby being squashed, and all the anguish it must have left in all those lives, the mother feeling guilty and the woman who was driving feeling guilty and then the little boy growing up and feeling guilty too. Harmony just knew she would never have been able to live with herself if she had been involved in a tragedy of that kind, which she easily could have been,it happened not three blocks from the Stardust and except for luck she could have been backing into that parking space. For two or three years it kept coming back into her mind, before that she had not been a worrier particularly or an overprotective mother, but once in a while the thought of the helpless baby would come back to her and she would almost feel dizzy for a second just from realizing how it could be such a near miss that kept you from being in a tragedy. And it had had a permanent effect on her parallel parking, she just would not back into a space without getting out of the car and checking to be sure there was nothing alive in it that she could run over—it often made people behind her pretty angry, along the Strip people did expect you to get on with the business of parallel parking.
    “Maybe we could rent a car for you to take the driver’s test in,” Harmony said. “Budget’s right there and they have real nice cars.”
    The minute she said it she realized that wouldn’t work either, they had canceled her Visa card and there was no way anymore to get a rent car without one. Denny had been supposed to get a raise and had talked her into letting him put six hundred dollars’ worth of scuba-diving equipment on her Visa, it was when they were spending a lot of time at the lake so she did it, and when the big Visa bill came and she tried to get him to at least pay part of it he had acted quite brash, the way he always did if you actually asked him for something, he told her he had considered the scuba-diving equipment a present, which flabbergasted Harmony, six hundred dollars was nearly two weeks’ wages. So she ended up losing her Visa, which was a big inconvenience.
    Pepper knew all about the trouble with Visa, she didn’t even bother to destroy the suggestion about the rent car.
    “Bonventre told me when he took his driver’s test hestole a car to take it in and the cops didn’t even catch him,” Pepper said. “Maybe I’ll just do that.”
    “Oh, Pepper,” Harmony said. “Now why did he tell you that? Bonventre’s my age.”
    “So? He still did it,” Pepper said.
    “Yeah but that was before they had computers,” Harmony said. “It’s easier to catch people now. Anyway, what were you talking to him for?”
    “He was at Madonna’s the other day,” Pepper said.
    “Well, he and Madonna used to be involved, when she was lead dancer at the Trop,” Harmony said. “Maybe they’ll get back together.
    Pepper curled her lip at that suggestion. She had a beautiful lip too, but Harmony would have rather she didn’t curl it quite so often.
    “He told her she had an ass like a prune, so I don’t guess they’ll get back together, Momma,” Pepper said. “How